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Taiwan Mobile Computing Industry Adopting Crusoe
plaXion writes, "California's Transmeta Corp said on Monday Taiwan's key computer manufacturing industry was already adopting one of its new chips as a de facto industry standard for new mobile 'Web pads.'" It's a New York Times story, free registration required to read.
So, when will we be able to buy a Transmeta version of what Jumptec has done for AMD with their DIMM PC, and what Cell Computing has done for Intel with their PNR?
I've been resisting buying Cell Computing's latest with a view to buying an equivalent Transmeta module for my own wearable dabblings... But I can only wait so long. :-)
--The more you know, the less you know.
What does it mean to say that "Taiwan ... had rushed to adopt the company's low-power Crusoe chips using the Mobile Linux operating system."??
Taiwan is a free capitalist country. "Taiwan" doesn't decide to do anything - individual companies do. Replace "Taiwan" with "US" and you'll see how ridiculous the quote is.
And it seems like a gross exaggeration to say that "The entire island of Taiwan is standardising on these mobile devices using Mobile Linux and Crusoe"? I doubt the "entire island of Taiwan" is standardizing on anything.
I don't know about Transmeta's mobile-linux, but I can see one significant advantage of using and embedded Linux (or even an embedded DOS): Microwindows.
It is a compact (100Kb) embeddable GUI which implements the bulk of both the Win32 and X11 APIs. That gives you a very simple port of any software from two environments. Why use WinCE, when you can recompile your apps and avoid the royalities?
I presume TM's Mobile Linux is using a cut-down Xfree86. It would be interesting to see how much of the 32Mb ROM they could free up by using a purpose-built embedded GUI. (I think Xfree86 is great, I'm just not convinced it is the optimal choice for embedded applications).